The right of the trust to give puberty blockers
Maybe just maybe people should slow down and think a little harder about this. Maybe it’s not the best idea in the world to halt or swap puberties the instant a child expresses dismay or confusion.
Vulnerable children are wrongly being given gender hormone treatment by the NHS, Sajid Javid believes, as he prepares to launch an urgent inquiry.
The health secretary thinks the system is “failing children” and is planning an overhaul of how health service staff deal with under-18s who question their gender identity.
Step one: understand that “gender identity” is a novel concept, that its meanings are disputed, that it’s subjective and malleable at best, and that it’s not nearly clear or sharp-edged enough to justify something as drastic as halting or exchanging puberty via hormone “treatments.”
Clinics in London, Leeds and Bristol run by the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust are England’s only specialist services for children and young people who identify as transgender. Critics have accused the trust of rushing children into life-altering treatment and being too willing to give puberty blockers to young teenagers.
What exactly is a “specialist service” for such children anyway? What is its knowledge base? How do its providers test their findings? How do they know which children really need their “service” and which don’t?
However, the Court of Appeal last year upheld the right of the trust to give puberty blockers to under-16s if they are deemed capable of consenting.
That’s an extremely bizarre way of looking at it. Maybe it’s just clumsy wording, but maybe it’s not. Why would it be the “right” of the trust to give blockers that needs to be upheld when the issue is the well-being of the children taking them? The issue surely is not the “rights” of the trust but the needs of the trust’s patients.
Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, has been leading a review into NHS gender identity services for children. In interim findings last month, she said children were being affected by a lack of expert agreement about the nature of gender identity problems, a “lottery” of care and long waiting lists.
Yeah no shit. This “lack of expert agreement” is what I’m talking about. How do they know any of this? When so much of it has simply been invented over the past few years? Mostly by rage-fueled “activists”?
Javid is said to be particularly alarmed by her finding that some non-specialist staff felt “under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach” to transitioning and that other mental health issues were “overshadowed” when gender was raised.
Gender is the elephant in the room. Once it enters, everything else tends to get squashed.
“That overly affirmative approach where people just accept what a child says, almost automatically, and then start talking about things like puberty blockers — that’s not in the interest of the child at all,” the ally said.
Or anyone else. It’s a lose-lose.
It’s odd, you know, when we hear so much about how tragic and agonizing it is to be trans, yet people are in such a mad rush to “affirm” and “validate” trans idennninies. Sometimes, to be fair, affirming and validating is just the ticket. There’s never been any good reason for homophobia, so Pride and affirmation made sense and made a difference. Trying to change sex is like an inversion of that, and it’s not working.
The inquiry will form part of Cass’s final report but Javid is understood to want to begin making the NHS change its approach immediately. This week he told MPs: “The NHS services in this area are . . . bordering on ideological.”
They would be, wouldn’t they, because the whole thing is ideological.
A spokesman for Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust said: “Being respectful of someone’s identity does not preclude exploration. We agree that support should be holistic, based on the best available evidence, and that no assumptions should be made about the right outcome for any given young person.”
But what does “being respectful of someone’s idenniny” mean? Why is the spokeser talking about it in connection with medical issues? What does anyone’s idennniny have to do with trying to turn puberty inside out? If a child identifies as short do you cut off her legs?
I met a man once who didn’t go through puberty until his mid-twenties, no drugs involved. He had been miserable, and it wasn’t just his body that was affected. It was his brain and social life that were affected, too. He was a deeply messed up individual, and once he did go through it he had a lot of messed up ideas about sex and sexuality. (Like many men, I guess.)
Anyway, I simply cannot imagine anyone leastwise a pediatrician who would advocate drugs to put “puberty on hold until they know if they’re trans.”
I could link to these two essays in a comment on any of the posts about the trans issue. They don’t speak about trans at all, but bring up factors that seem relevant.
This one talks about the way high school is set up that hurts the psychology of adolescents.
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
This one talks about heresy of any sort, & its suppression.
http://www.paulgraham.com/heresy.html
How likely is it that any child is going to even think there’s such a thing, or that they even have a “gender identity” without being told they have one? Without outside influence, I don’t tbelieve they would ever come to think “Oh, I must really be a girl/boy because I like girl/boy things, even though I’m a boy/girl.” They might figure out that some playthings, preferences or activities are coded as “for boys” or “for girls”, but that’s still an outside “social” influence. Saying such children (who, should simply be thought of as “gender non-conforming”, if they’re going to be thought of as being anything at besides just children) is to reach a conclusion and saddle them with a diagnosis. It’s as inappropriate as Dawkins’ example of calling children Christian, or Muslim, Tory, or Socialist. It prevents children from just being kids.
Other childhood flights of imagination are not freighted with the same import that putative “gender identity” now carries. What would happen if tlarge parts of society suddenly behaved towards children as if they really were the elephants, or dinosaurs or robots they sometimes imagine themselves to be? What if schools did this without the knowledge of parents? What if powerful institutions and agencies insisted that this was a proper and humane thing to do, and demonized and villified anyone who said otherwise? Would such children treated in such a way end up with a pathologically deluded self image? Fortunately, society at large does not do this, and there are no corresponding industries eager to profit from the surgical transformation of children into elephants, dinosaurs and robots at the drop of a hint of whimsy. Unfortunately there is an entire system built around doing that to children who have been led to believe that they are “really” the other sex. Too many of the supposed adults in the room are prepared to push children into irreversible mutilation and lifelong medical dependency “for their own good,” with no proof that any good will come from it at all. None of these would-be Rumplestiltskins realize that turning children into the opposite sex is as impossible as turning straw into gold, or changing human children into elephants, dinosaurs, or robots.
I had an uncle who never went through puberty, but they gave him growth hormone so he’d be of normal stature. The result was a young man with what amounted to a 6’3” 10 year old body. He was a twisted and unhappy man who made everybody in his orbit unhappy. It takes more than drugs to fix people.
YNNB @3
Gender dysphoria (so-called; it’s sex dysphoria really) does predate gender identity ideology.
Ever read The Well of Loneliness? Radclyffe Hall’s protagonist exhibits every symptom of childhood gender dysphoria, and the book was published in 1928.
Of course, Hall and her protagonist both were lesbians in adulthood. Both grew up in a time of rigid gender roles. Both had miserable childhoods (Hall’s father abandoned the family, and she hated her mother.)
Textbook cases, really.
How tragic that all these years later we believe that what dysphoric children need is to be “affirmed” as the sex they’re not–let alone medicated.
By the way, it’s interesting that TRAs haven’t transed Hall, even though she went by a masculine name in real life (John). I guess even they don’t dare claim that the author of a lesbian classic was a man.
Thank you for that Lady Mondegreen.
I certainly wouldn’t argue against the fact that there are children who do in fact feel such distress, or deny that the distress is real. But the number of those children who would benefit from actual reassignment is probably a lot smaller than the number of children being transed, but under current conditions, we can’t know. Captured institutions have an axe to grind, and grinding that axe seems to be a lot more important to these organizations than actually helping children. The genderists’s quickness to both diagnose and “treat” any child who is showing signs of gender non-conformity short-circuits the option of desistance. Their dubious positing of a reified, (yet unevidenced) gendered “soul,” the supposed demands of which are supposed to be given priority over those of the actually-known-to exist physical body also stands in the way of effective treatment. Given trans activists’s rejection of third-space bathroom facilities for trans identifying people in preference to gaining access to women’s facilities, I’m guessing that if offered the choice of actually helping dysphoric children at the cost of abandoning the idea of a “gendered soul” that requires validation and affirmation, many of them would forgo the former in order to maintain belief in the latter. The forced teaming of genuinely dysphoric people with AGP males and opportunistic men seeking access to female spaces really does little to help these children either. The real needs of these people are very poorly served by the current incarnation of the trans “rights” movement, which seems more interested in erasing or redefining women, and helping men force their way into women’s formerly single sex spaces.
These twitter threads are a better expression of some of the ideas I was groping towards above:
https://mobile.twitter.com/prof_curiosity1/status/1515589112643915778
https://mobile.twitter.com/prof_curiosity1/status/1518144001895022593?cxt=HHwWgoC-7aP7w5EqAAAA
Both look at different ways the concept of “trans” children (instead of dysphoric children) erodes safeguarding for children and attacks childhood itself.